Road trips can help lay down path to future

Published: Sunday, April 03, 2005

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK - For some families, spring break means lazy days on the beach or a trip to Disney World. But for families with a high school junior in the house, it's often the start of an ambitious week of college visits in search of an amiable match.

There are corners of New England where nearly a dozen leafy, pricey liberal arts colleges can be visited in a week. The Boston metro area alone has more than 40 four-year institutions.

The Forgang family of suburban Larchmont, N.Y., visited seven schools in six days with their eldest daughter, Marcy, focusing on upstate New York, Connecticut and Boston, at times hitting two schools in one day. The Anthonys of Desoto, a suburb of Dallas, planned their own New England sweep last month, hoping to hit nine schools in four states, traveling from Marlboro College in Vermont to Sarah Lawrence, just north of New York City.

"You can't just pack your kid up and send him off. He really needs to get a sense of the culture," said Janet Anthony, who wondered about the Northeast weather this time of year and noted that 17-year-old Alex had bought some new shoes to replace his Texas-weather Birkenstocks.

These challenging excursions make my daughter, Beth, and me look like slackers, visiting a meager four colleges. Even so, our own road trip, bookended by snowstorms, covered 1,000 miles and two mid-Atlantic states: University of Maryland in College Park, a suburb of Washington; Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; University of Virginia in Charlottesville; and College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

Just coming up with a list like that can take a whopping amount of research plus advice from the high school counselor. The Fiske Guide to Colleges becomes bedtime reading for a while.

The idea is to give the prospective college student a taste of different settings and to ultimately find a good fit. Along the way, you have a chance to explore some corners of the country you might never have happened upon.

Facts and folklore gleaned from our trip:

 The University of Maryland's mascot is a terrapin named Testudo, and his bronze image sits in front of McKeldin Library on the College Park campus. His nose is rubbed shiny, and before him, like offerings to a pagan god, are candy and a wrinkly dollar bill given by students seeking luck before a test. Our tour guide says that once when Testudo was kidnapped, the campus grade-point average dropped a 10th of a point and then bounced back when he was returned.

 Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia, designing its stunning rotunda overlooking a great lawn as the focal point of his "academical village," where young scholars (i.e., plantation owners' sons) and professors would live and debate and think great thoughts together.

 Jefferson's own college education took place about 120 miles down the road at the College of William & Mary, founded in 1693 in Williamsburg. The town's restored colonial village is a major tourist attraction.

Planning a journey like this requires a road atlas, consultation of all the university Web sites, and hotel reservations. It simplifies matters to choose one reliable hotel chain in your price range; some chains offer free nights easily earned by signing up for a credit card or paying for one or two stays at various locations.

We picked Marriott Courtyard for two of our stops but also sought a recommendation from the Williamsburg Chamber of Commerce for a place to stay within walking distance of the William & Mary campus. That produced the Williamsburg Hospitality House, where the restaurant offered the food splurge of our trip - Maryland crab cakes with risotto and desserts of bread pudding and chocolate mint ice cream in a martini glass.

Hotel No. 4, the nicest place of all and no more expensive, was found on the fly. Failing to make plans for Baltimore, our final stop, I had Beth call her dad by cell phone from the road. He searched www.hotels.com and came up with the Radisson Cross Keys, about five minutes from Johns Hopkins.

It makes sense to allow at least three hours per college campus, given all the effort of getting there. And it's a good idea to time your visits so that you can hit the campus tour and information sessions - those typically take at least two hours.

Many schools - certainly the large ones - offer tours and information sessions both morning and afternoon, so you can visit two schools in one day, as the Forgang family did in Boston. But distance made that impossible for us. We usually had about 125 to 200 miles to cover between schools.

We would generally drive through the campus when we arrived in each new city. Even that gives you a certain vibe. Why does everyone seem to be jogging at the University of Virginia, even in winter?

And we'd try to eat in a campus-area setting, too. At a Williamsburg sandwich shop, a colonial gentleman in three-cornered hat stopped by for a snack. And in Maryland's student center, we wolfed down waffle fries and chicken sandwiches from Chick-fil-A - along with nostalgia for our previous home in Texas where the restaurant chain is big.

Weather was a factor on our trip. We didn't bargain for the snowstorm our last day that followed us all the way home from Baltimore up the New Jersey Turnpike in a harrowing nighttime drive.

Still, at the end of the trip, Beth had a clear idea of college options. One university was off the list, three remained. But we're not finished yet.